47 - Spinning globe & star effects

All right, we're getting to the end now. This video here is going to be about Effects and Presets. And we're going to make this the spinning globey thing, with some stars in the background. I know it's not the most exciting thing but I guess what it helps demonstrate is that we've now gone through and learnt all kind of the fundamentals of After Effects. There are cameras, and precomps, and key frames. Now that you understand those things there are a zillion Effects and Presets that you can go and use. We've just used a couple in this Effects and Presets window. There are loads.

Now those are ones just built into After Effects. There are lots of third party stuff. There are free ones, and paid ones. I just want to show you this example because I want to show you how quickly you can get to something like this. It's only about 4 or 5 clicks to make this thing. I exaggerate a little, but you know, you can get this going in 1 minute, if you hurry. Based on Effects that other people have done. So there's lots out there. So hopefully now, we got the basic After Effects skills, we'll be able to go off and—

I taught you how to fish, maybe, and you can go off now and do your own stuff. So let's build this. Let's go to 'File', 'New', 'Project'. Let's make a 'New Composition'. And this one here is going to 'black' background, it's going to be '5 secs' long. It's going to be 'HDTV'. We should give it a name, I never do. Let's bring in - double click down here - let's bring in 'World Map.ai'. It's an Illustrator file. It's got a vectory, globey thing, drag it in.

Now what we want to do is turn it into that globe. So over here, in 'Effects & Presets', there's one in here called 'CC Sphere'. All these ones, the CC, it's nothing to do with Creative Cloud. The company that license the Adobe license from them is called something core something like that, anyway, CC. So that's been around a while, and that's the effect. These are third party ones that Adobe have decided to pay for themselves and put in to After Effects for you. So there's loads in here that start with CC. We'll use lots of them in this one.

The cool thing about it is we got a globe, hey, how about that? Now let's play around with the 'Radius'. It's at '200', I'm going to get mine to '400' just so you can see it. The other cool thing is, under 'Rotation' here, watch this, I'm not going to use the first one, I'll use the second one here. Oops, wrong rotation. You can see, hey, look at that. We got a 3D globe. So put it back to '0'. And what I'd like to do is let's get it to spin 360°.

So at the beginning here, we're going to set a key frame for 'Y rotation'. You'll see down here, if I hit you, there he is there. Okay, it's key frame all the way to the end. And instead of dragging this, like we normally do, I'll get it to go completely around. So instead of typing 360 over here, this first little one, this means one time around. If I type it in three times, it's going to try and spin three times around in my little time here. So it's going to spin a bit fast, watch.

So actually I'm going to go here, and I'm going to say just one times around, even that's a bit fast. One of the things in here is that you can see the inside, which is kind of-- depends on what you want, right? Can you see, you can see the back of South America there, What we want to do is, we want to-- I said South America, I didn't mean it. That's Africa, good work, Dan. That's embarrassing that my geography is that bad. The big one.

So, let's look at getting rid of this inside. At the moment it's rendering at full, we can say, just the outside. Now it will just have the outside bits. What we also can do, let's put an ocean in. Now to put an ocean in, actually just go to 'Layer', 'New', let's put in a 'Solid'. Pick the color of the ocean. I'm going to have kind of a light blue color. Nice. And then add that same 'CC Sphere'. Now we could just drag this across and add it, and adjust it, however we want it to, but actually let's just click on 'World Map' and up here, where CC Sphere is you see this, there he is there, click on him. Just hit 'Copy' on my keyboard, jump to this guy, and hit 'Paste'. You can see, it just sucks in the same radius, and has the same rotation. Rotation doesn't mean much because it's on-- because it's one solid mess, but let's play around with the layer order.

So let's drag this medium royal blue thing here. I'm going to rename it, let's call this one 'Water'. And you can see now, we have a globe with some water. So you can see, just how by using some of these presets here, just one of them, actually to get this going. Just dump it on a layer, I've dumped it on two layers, it's got it to spin with some key frames.

Let's look at one of the other CC ones. Let's look at something called star, or something like that. 'CC Star Burst'. So this one here is going to give us that star field effect. So what we need to do is, for this one I'm going to have nothing selected, 'Layer', 'New'. You see, although mine was grayed out it's kind of half way through fixing one of these bits, sometimes it's easier to click off in the background. Comes back to life, let's go to 'New', 'Solid'. This one's going to be my 'Stars'. What color my star's going to be? I'm going to give you white. And that's all that it is, and then we go to 'CC Stars', and add it to it. Cool thing. Watch this. It's already animated, ready to go.

This looks like-- it has been blown up though. So, let's look at-- I'll just pull this down so it just renders a bit faster. Now it's just a matter of playing around with some of these bits. So, 'Scatter', can you see, I can-- How far they're apart: Speed, I'm going to slow it down, maybe '0.2'. It's just a matter of playing around, how much do you want this? Maybe a bit big. The size, keep it down to '50'. So small, like dots. There's lots to play around with. Just experiment.

The other thing I might do is put the layer order. Can you see my stars are above everything. I'm going to put below my water. There's my globe at the front there. Can you see, just with a couple of little effects and a couple of little adjustments we've got something reasonably high value. And I guess that's what I wanted to show you for the last thing.

Now it's time to fish and go off, and find other things to do. What I'll do for my website as well is I've got some other more advanced projects or smaller projects that you can do. So check out those as well, have a look through the course list. Let's move on to the last thing. We're going to look at some advanced exporting. All right, see you in the next video.